Competition

 There is honorable competition and dishonorable competition. By honorable, I here mean a good utilitarian action - one that produces the most good for the most people. By competition, I'll mean action with unequal outcomes sought by more than one person. Honorable businesses often win, but not always. An appropriate term for business is something that serves products, under this term criminal enterprise is hereto included. A factor thus is legality vs illegality. Criminality and the law are opposing forces, therefore the other is good/bad because of the other. We here assume the law is mostly, though not universally, good. Have we then sufficiently discovered dishonorable competition? No, we have only covered the criminally dishonorable competition.

Is only that which is legal good? To assert that means we believe the law is omnipotent and omnipresent, where the law doesn't exist there can be no discernment of criminality. As we stated the law is not always good, this may be due to it criminalizing a good, or legalizing bad action. Does the law criminalize anything good? Many answers are given to this, but we can answer it quite definitively because it is a binary question. What is good in this sense? Here I'll define the good in holding with the previous fashion - anything that produces a net of gain of pleasure and loss of suffering. 

To understand the law, it is useful to investigate the forces that try to change it. Do any political party try to decriminalise anything? Yes, that is common knowledge. Do any governing parties attempt to decriminalize anything? Yes, a non-exhaustive list is: abortion, breastfeeding in public, drug possession, recreational drug use, euthanasia, gambling, homosexuality, polygamy, prostitution, public nudity, and steroid use in sports. Are all these good? That is irrelevant. Here we seek evidence, that with reasonable probability, based on the secret beliefs of large masses of people expressed at the ballot box, some good things are criminalized. The last question of this premiss is to ask if a reasonable part of the parties' voter base comes from their attempts at decriminalization. For that, we argue the backbiting competition of politics forces parties to adopt policies that will likely attract votes. Therefore we assume a sufficient number of people support the idea that the law has criminalized something good.